understand what it all means. we're also going to focus on donald trump's social media platform truth social. we'll speak to an academic who's assessing its impact on news coverage in the us, and we'll speak to the programmer who was there right at the start. but our first guest today is the executive chairman of sky news. david rhodes has thejob of keeping the rolling news channel relevant in the age of social media — a tough gig, but he's well qualified. he's held jobs at cbs and bloomberg, and his career began back in the �*90s at rupert murdoch's fox news. let's start off with david rhodes, who's here in the media show studio. hi, david. thanks for coming in. thanks. — thank you guys for having me. let's go back quite a few years to when you were vice president of news for fox.

how did you get that gig? i got that gig because i worked my way up from running the autocue. honestly. i started working there in 1996 at the beginning of this career, and, basically, they hired 700 people about the size of the newsroom we now have working in english at sky, and we're doing that over the space of about three months. so, not to diminish my credentials for that opportunity, but i mean, basically, if you could get in the door, they were hiring a lot of people in a really short span of time and you sort of work your way up. that was my entry—level opportunity. and when you were at fox, you presumably were aware that it was becoming quite a divisive presence within the american media. well, i left in 2008. i worked for news corp a second time when i first moved to this country, at that time to spec out what later became talktv. and then i left the company a second time about three years ago when i went to work at sky on the business side.

did you know rupert murdoch, when you...? back in those fox days, was he present at fox? were you...? at what point did you encounter him? you know what's interesting — when you talk about somebody who actually, you know, has seen the programme, engages with it, has an opinion, i mean, he is one of those people. and i think that he's interested to know what's going on. he's interested in what you've heard, what you're reporting, what's going to be in the programme, what's going to be in the paper. you know, in those early years, that first time working at the company, i really had no interaction with him because i was a, relatively speaking, at a line level. you know, this second time around, i mean, he's now... he just turned 93 last month. so he was... and it was also covid. and i was relocating from the united states, but he was still very interested in the work that we were doing. and ijust mainly found him to be, you know, an engaged proprietor.

i mean, maybe that... maybe that falls short of the mark of all the stories that people expect. but he wasjust interested and engaged. i can remember talking to some...one person who worked within us cable news in the early part of the noughties, saying that everyone knew down to the minute when the ratings were going to arrive in the afternoon, and the whole day kind of revolved around it, and they would break down each item and, "that worked, "that didn't work," to a degree that sounded like it went beyond... everyone cares about the ratings in the uk too, of course, but this sounded like it was on another level. but think about where we are now, where you walk around any newsroom, like the newsroom here at the bbc — you know, it's fair to say our newsroom at sky, you know... we have up the, you know, adobe screens... real—time data. the real—time data. the, you know, click rate. you know, the performance of different items of text. i mean, now you're sort of buried in this. so, yes, you used to get... time was you got sort

of an average minute audience against linear television and you kind of checked your decisions against that in a commercial context. now you're getting, you know, 54 flavours of that. and after your second stint with rupert murdoch and, as has been documented, you land the job as executive chairman of the sky news group and you arrive, and presumably one of the first things that you have to do is analyse the situation that sky news is in within the broader news ecosystem. i wonder what your conclusions were about — what was going for sky, but also equally what needed to change. it's a great brand, and what i think it has going for it is a real ability to be agile. so, for instance, stuart ramsay goes to haiti in recent weeks, interviews barbecue, who's the gang leader that's rolled up all the other gangs in the absence of any real civil authority. and we entered into that story onjournalistic merit. and we did so partly, too, because stuart had

relationships there built on that he'd been to haiti a year before and identified this guy. and i think it's important to note that i thought, "all right, we're doing this just on journalistic merit "and it's an important story and we're proud of it." but it actually found an audience, principally on youtube and among younger people and x uk, where it's 2 or 3 million hits. our italian service did a similar conversation with him. that's had 400,000 on instagram. so you find your audience in places you didn't necessarily expect it, or certainly didn't expect to find it before. i think we're the only people in yemen right now with alex crawford there. so, the opportunity to do that kind of quality coverage and find that there's a commercial opportunity revolving around it, you don't get to do that just about any place.

clearly, there are lots of questions at the moment around elections, how we're all going to cover them, including, of course, the american election. we're going to be talking about truth social and donald trump later. but i wondered, for you at sky, how will you be advising your colleagues to cover trump? media have made mistakes covering all politicians, but media have made mistakes covering donald trump really back to the beginning, i mean, really before him coming down the escalator. what kind of mistakes? you know, in terms of... ..in terms ofjust thinking about the approach that media were taking. i give an example from actually the cbs experience. like, if people remember the charlottesville episode in 2017, so it's the first year of trump's presidency. there's this fascist rally in charlottesville. there's a rally against the rally. it becomes violent. i mean, it was a really painful episode, and,

famously, he had trouble addressing it. he said... trump said it was because he was waiting to get all the facts. there was criticism that he delayed his response. then there was a response to that later, in which he says, " look, you have to look at what "was happening there," and there was blame on both sides. some aides, like gary cohen, suggested that they later left the administration over those comments. but a couple of other things happened after that. the first was, media did make mistakes in terms of how that those remarks were covered. for instance, there were accounts that said that he said the sides were equally to blame, and he didn't say they were equally to blame. and you just leave a hint of that kind of controversy, and that's enough for people to drive a truck through and just say, "look, this is the bias "that we've been talking about all along.

"he didn't say that." that was a mistake. but equally, and the reason why that event sticks with me, is at cbs we polled it and it was only by about ten points. it was like a 55/45 that people felt that he was in the wrong, even though the events had been really hard to watch — torch—wielding neo—nazis and all this stuff. and... you know, when you unpack it, though, why do people feel that way? you saw in the surveys people saying, you know, "i disagree with him, "i don't like what he had to say on that day, "but i hate the media so much, "and he's in opposition to you guys "and so i'm with him." so you've got to, i think, as a profession, take account of — how did you get to a place where there's at least, you know, some aspect of 45% of the american people that could actually think that the media is that dishonest that they would not be willing to... ..you know, have expressed a certain opinion on that?

that's something people should take stock of. well, listening to us talk, david, has been madhumita murgia from the financial times. you're here because we're going to talk about artificial intelligence and, david, i know you're looking at this. every newsroom is looking at this. but let's start off with the lead story on the front page of the ft today, which is all about openai, an organisation, and meta. for people who haven't seen it, tell us what the story is. so, this is based on having spoken to two leaders - from the two companies in the past week, both i of whom sort of tantalisinglyj dropped hints about the next models, the next ai software that's going to be rolled out. | for most of us today, you know, . our first introduction directly. to ai systems was probably chatgpt, maybe dall—e - if you were if you were kind of playing around a lot. - and there might be lots of people listening who've never tried any of it. yeah, but i think chatgpt.

was really the first time that people were able to interact with an ai system. - but even before that, - if you have recommended ads and posts on social media, j if you've chosen something to watch on netflix, - if you've ordered an uber, you are interacting with an ai system, so chatgpt was noti at all the first time, i but it is the first kind of interface where we can literally communicate - with ai—generated text. but this year we're looking at the next kind of wave i of more sophisticated ai| technologies, which will, again, be able to converse back and forth, but also kind - of summarise information, create videos, code, - you know, doing things that we believed to bel human—domain—creativity. .. ..you know, kind of. qualities for decades. the really interesting . thing from what i wrote about was that these scientists and ceos and so on believe - that the next models. will be able to reason, will be able to plan, and this is really what the word - means in english.

they'll be able to kind of look forward to how to perform - an action and be able to figure out what are the steps - they need to take in i order to achieve that. so, itjust makes them a lot more able to do tasks - autonomously. essentially, is that making them more human? i know elon musk on monday predicted that ai will overtake human intelligence in the next year. he previously said that wouldn't happen until 2029. yeah, i'm not sure how much store i put by his comments. | ok, so you're saying he's not right, we've got a bit of leeway! but what would that mean for the media? your story, if it's true that they're going to be able to reason, what does it mean for newsrooms and the media? so, it doesn't mean they're i going to be human in any way, but what it does mean. is that these companies are trying to develop ai assistants. - so, think of it as just your own individual. assistant or agent. it might have a name. today we have things like alexa that we kind of recognise - by name, and that will be how you interface l with the internet. so today you go to maybe

google as the front page i of the internet for you, right? 0rtwitter orx, - or meta or whatever. tiktok. that's where you look - through where you want to go. or it might be the ft.com home page or, you know, j a tv channel. but what they want to do is everyone shouldj have their own personal ai assistant which will- decide for you. but i think the big current challenge that everybodyl who runs large media - organisations needs to be thinking about is, is this the - next wave of disintermediation? so, we've already had - social media comments... what does that mean? well, it means that big l tech companies become, you know, the platform through which we consume the news. i say the word again. big tech? . no, disin... we've heard that phrase before! disintermediation. ok, that's a new one. well, it's, you know... we used to distribute - news through newspapers, and that was the big cost. but then you have facebook or meta and all of the kind i of social media platforms and the internet itself, i which made it extremely cheap

to put something online - and reach billionsl of people at once. but then they also become - the pipes on which we are now reliant. most of our online media . organisations are dependent on these big—tech - companies for their views. you need to go via. google to be found. with ai, that risk becomes evenl more extreme, because not only are they responsible - for showing your website to your viewers, they may also provide the answer. i and that's what they're - all working on at the moment. generative ai is essentially a sort of question—answerl summarisation system. so what it's saying is, - "ask me a question "and i'll tell you the answer," and - that's kind of the point of us. and one of the reasons we've asked you on is that you have a new book out called code dependent, and it looks at how ai risks exacerbating existing inequalities in society. i wonder if i could ask you that, from the point of view of news and from

journalism, because already, and i'm sure sky is very focused on this, there is a risk with news that it super—serves some sections of society, and other sections of society largely don't access the news that's being produced. yeah, i think that one - of the patterns i saw again and again across my book — and i travelled to nine - countries because i wantedj to go outside of the bubble of silicon valley to look- at really how ai is impacting people and industries, - in argentina and kenya and india... i saw it with health care, with public services, - with work — you're seeing - a concentration of power more than we've seen before. it's a very small handful of tech companies thatl are amassing that data, - that knowledge, and now these kind of algorithms . that they're running. with the news business, - you know, you've already seen local news media kind - of dwindling when we had social media. and even recently, with the la times, washington post, - we've seen major dwindling ofjournalists there. - the concern is that that kind.

of inequality is going to grow. david, do you think ai is going to putjournalists out ofjobs? i mean, some of what happened in news organisations was there are some which navigated the technological moment that came just before this. and there's others that just didn't do a particularly good job of that. i mean, the fact is that, you know, the majority of the internet's written in english. many of the sort of first principles of what these language models are learning off of is english language and, in some cases, journalistic content. so there's kind of a built—in advantage here for people who are involved in the kind of activity we do, in terms of the rule writing of this whole system that we're in. david rhodes, executive chairman of sky news group, thank you very much for being here. all very illuminating. i know you've got to rush. i do want to talk about something else, which is — on monday, donald trump posted a video about abortion laws

in the us, and he did so on his social media platform, truth social. he posts there regularly. we wanted to have a look at truth social in detail, and we'll do so with the help of one of the people who set it up. but first, let's look at what it is. we've gotjoshua tucker, who's a professor of politics at new york university and co—director of the university's center for social media and politics. joshua, thank you so much for being, well, almost with us — with us down the line. for someone who hasn't heard of it before, just explain — what is truth social? thanks, katie. thanks for having me here. truth social is one of a number of new platforms that have emerged in the us that have tried to cater to different audiences. truth social falls into the category of what we would call twitter clones. it kind of looks like twitter. it has the same basic affordances as twitter. it was primarily directed at an audience of people who were supporters of president trump and who were interested in continuing discussions that the organisers of truth social thought were not being able to have on these mainstream platforms. so there are a bunch

of these platforms. there's a lot of them that have sprung up that are sort of smaller, kind of niche platforms that go after particular target audiences, but use a similar set—up to one of the big mainstream platforms. and hi, joshua. it's ros here. people may be aware that trump's truth social has been in the news an awful lot because it's recently gone public in the last couple of weeks, and for a while at least it had an incredibly high valuation of in the region of $11 billion. just explain what's happened there. right. so, on the one hand, you might expect the basic financials of the market are doing it because people see promise in it as developing future economic value. but the other explanation for it is that it's become a meme stock. it's become a way essentially for people to bet on former president trump. the ticker symbol, appropriately enough, is now called djt. that's the ticker symbol that pulls up for this new company. his initials, just to point that out. yeah, exactly — his initials. and so, and as you pointed out, the price of it skyrocketed.

but i've been pulling it up over the course of... as we're talking here today. it's down another 4% today. and where is it? it peaked around $80 a share. it's now down to about $36 a share. so there's a huge question about whether there is a financially viable model here for this to go forward, other than this process of being a meme stock. 0k. well, i would likejoshua to bring in billy boozer, who was chief product officer at truth social back almost from the very beginning. billy, welcome to the media show. i just want to know, when did you first hear about it, truth social, and how did you end up getting involved? so, i actually had a good - friend that was being brought into the project because of his expertise in a specific - technology. and he called me and said, . "hey, i've got an opportunity. "would you be interested in coming in?" _ and showed up and there's four people there, five people - there thinking about l and hacking on what it would look like to create a social network for a, l you know, a us president that is probably the most|

controversial us - president in us history. and so i was like, "this i is the craziest thing "that you could ever be a part of, l and there's no way "to not say yes to it," as well as i had a lot of inclinations - towards free speech and had a lot of friends that - were being deplatformed or fired from theirjobs . in the us because of. their christian values. and so ijust decided that this was the right opportunity- to address a problem - that we were seeing in our country where free speech i was being limited, and also the media was not necessarily distributing information that l seemed accurate to l the real—world picture that we were seeing every day. and how much interaction did you have with djt? donald trump, i mean. well, i got to go down- to mar—a—lago and present the application to himl for the first time ever. we had, like, special devices that we would give him - so that he could have the - application and engage with it. he actually gave me the key to the white house. - retrospectively, i'm fairly - certain that it does not unlock

a door there. you haven't tried it? i have not had - the opportunity... you might get shot — i think it's not a good idea. i do not think so either. but i got the opportunity to meet with him. - and one of the things- that was really interesting about president trump is that he's... - this is, i think, - what engenders him with the conservative right — which is he seems likel an everyday person when you're sitting down in front of him, - having conversations with him. we've all met, you know, highly influential people i throughout our lives. and at times those people seem to talk through you, _ not to you. and president trump was not like that. - he's one of those people that| actually will sit down and look you in the eye and havel a conversation with you. now, a lot of those . conversations devolve into having conversations about president trump, i but that's primarily because there's a lot of gravity... i so he'll talk to you, but primarily about himself. but i wonder, when you were talking to him, could he use what you were building? yeah, is he a techy sort of guy? famously, he's not that keen

on using computers, is he? that's correct. i mean, he's not- necessarily a technologist. and i mean, honestly, - that was one of the bigger outcomes that came out| of building truth social — was we ran into a lot- of political people and people that were very interested | in that political spectrum, and so few of them understood technology in itself. _ i mean, like, we were talking earlier about artificial - intelligence and the breakdown between what society realises. or expects out of these technologies and how i they can communicate them. so, for instance, in the ai - world, they talk about tokens a lot and things like that. and those aren't terms that - the average person understands. and so the same goes for politicians. - the vast majority of them have no understanding. about technology whatsoever. and because of that, - it's actually one of the things that concerns me the most, because that technology- is actually what is - disintermediating society in itself. if you look at it from . a non—one—to—five—year perspective but a 20—yearl perspective, you'll see that

technology is shaping. the entirety of society. so if our politicians don't understand technology, i they won't understand - the direction of society moving forward. well, let's try and understand the impact that this platform has had. yini zhang is assistant professor at the department of communication at the university of buffalo. and, yini, you've done some of the first academic research on truth social. tell us what you've been looking into. thank you for the question, and thank you for having me. well, like, our study really looks at the political implication of truth social. and we did so by comparing trump's ability to drive news attention using truth social during the 2022 us midterm elections versus his ability to do so with twitter during the 2016 primary elections in the us. so we're curious to see if he was able to do the same thing with truth social as he was able to do so with twitter back in 2016. and did he?

could he? does he get the same impact with the news media and with everything through trump social...? "trump social"! truth social. i knew i was going to do that. i've been doing that all day. ..truth social as opposed to twitter or x? truth social was almost as effective as twitter in terms of driving news attention to trump and his social media activity. but truth social was not that effective compared to twitter in the sense that... ..well, like during the 2022 midterm election cycle, journalists stopped directly embedding his truth social posts in the news stories on their websites. and the number of such stories actually is orders of magnitude smaller than the number of stories embedding his tweets back in 2016. well, yini, we appreciate your help in helping us understand the impact of these posts on truth social. billy boozer, you helped create this product, but you don't work for truth social any more. how come?

and how was the process of leaving trump world? you know, i believe that a lot of these social networks have gone through an iteration where they've realised — i and i think elon was the one that really pointed this out i really well within x — is that they've gone i through this iteration - where advertising has been the primary mechanism of monetisation. - and now we're seeing that there are other. opportunities and other options to create monetisation - and create value for. your underlying users. and so i was kind of... for my entire career, i've been an anti—advertising person. - i believe that it is - a mechanism of control for a platform and puts - the platform and its creators in an adversarial relationship . based on algorithms and based on their need to create more impressions for. their underlying advertisers. and so, you know, we bifurcated in leadership based on that -

idea ofjust not having - advertising as the predicate for how we were going to make money with that service. - and so ijust decided - it was not the right place to be, because i didn't feel. like that in itself would allow for a true free speech network. even though i'm not there now, i i would support president trump going into the next election, . primarily because of my values, and even though i didn't really make a ton of money off of it! | that's it for today. thanks to all our guests. we'll be back at the same time next weekend. but for now, from katie and from me, thanks very much indeed for your company. bye—bye. hello there. tuesday was another fairly cool day, winds a little bit lighter.

but we had further showers, some heavy with hail and thunder once again. next few days, it's pretty similar, it stays on the chilly side. there will be further showers or longer spells of rain, a bit of sunshine. nights will be cool. we're still in this chilly air mass, as you can see here, for wednesday. so it means things starting off rather chilly. further showers across eastern areas, and this tangle of weather fronts will bring thicker cloud and some rain to western parts of the uk through the day. so we'll start with some showers across eastern scotland, some snow on the hills, showers, windy weather affecting the northeast of england. could be quite cold and windy for north sea coasts of yorkshire. this area of cloud and rain pushes across the hebrides, northern ireland down into parts of wales, southwest england through the course of the day. in between, there will be some sunshine around, but it's going to be a cooler day, we think, temperatures 9—11 celsius for most of us, single digits along north sea coasts. the showers linger on for a while through wednesday night before it turns drier and clearer with lighter winds across england and wales. so, here it will turn quite chilly. temperatures recovering,

though, in the northwest as wetter and windier weather starts to move in thanks to this little area of low pressure, which will bring wet and windy weather to the northern half of the country through the day on thursday. this area of high pressure will tend to keep things drier in the south. so england and wales starting off chilly but bright, plenty of sunshine, wetter, cloudier windier weather will move across scotland, northern ireland and down into parts of north wales, northern england, the north midlands. southern england, south wales will do pretty well with staying dry, i think, with some sunshine, lighter winds here. so temperatures around 11; celsius, but windier, wetter, cooler further north. that area of low pressure clears away gradually during the course of friday, high pressure starts to topple in, but we could start off with a few showers through central, southern and eastern areas on friday, a brisk northerly breeze affecting much of the country, particularly towards the east. lighter winds further south and west, variable clouds, some sunshine, temperatures could be up to 111—15 celsius degrees in the south. still quite cool in the north. now into the weekend, we're expecting this area of high pressure to move in.

so i think it'll be turning a lot drier, but we could see quite a bit of cloud around. that depends on what we'll see with temperatures. if we see some sunshine, then we could see the high teens across some central and southern areas. if it's cloudier, it could be a bit cooler than this.

live from washington, this is bbc news. tensions remain high as israel weighs a wider response to iran's attack. the firstjurors are selected in donald trump's new york hush money trial. and billions in india prepare to head to the polls in one of the largest elections in the world.

hello, i'm helena humphrey. good to have you with us. we start in the middle east, where white house national security advisorjake sullivan has confirmed that the united states will impose new sanctions on iran in the coming days. the announcement comes after the iranian attack on israel last saturday, with more than 300 drones and missiles launched. according to the israeli defence forces, 99% of them were intercepted by israel's aerial defense system and its partners. well, iran says the attack was retaliation for a deadly strike on its consulate in the syrian capital damascus on 1 april. that attack killed a top iranian commander, alongside six others — including civilians. the us has vowed that its support for israel is ironclad but has urged restraint in its response. a senior us official says israel is not sharing its targeting of iran with washington, so the biden administration does not know how or when israeli retaliation will take place. though some officials expect it to be a limited strike

inside the country.